Harmonix’s crowdfunding campaign for a PC version of Rock Band 4 which required $1.5 million to succeed has not reached it’s target, generating a little less than $800k.
This has lead to the company cancelling their plans for the PC version of game, although the lack of cash does not appear to be the main factor. “We learned exactly what we needed to learn: there doesn’t seem to be enough of an audience to make Rock Band for PC a viable project for us right now,” explains a post.
“As an independent developer we have to be careful about how much money and development time we risk on a project we’re not sure has a big enough audience, and crowdfunding allowed us to (among other things) judge the market fit for Rock Band PC.”
You may be wondering why Harmonix would be asking for crowdfunding when they had a huge hit with the orginal Rock Band and should be rolling in cash.
“Rock Band was successful, but at the time that RB was at the peak of popularity Harmonix was wholly owned by Viacom/MTV. Since then we have gone independent, and have limited resources compared to the days we were owned by a giant media conglomerate.”
“We were willing to commit $500,000 of our own capital towards the development of RB4 for PC. We also committed to ongoing support of the PC version as a core Rock Band platform, alongside the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, with the same regular updates and DLC stream. But we can’t fund the entire development, especially without knowing whether there’s a market (hence crowdfunding). ”
Source: Fig.co
